A product designer

Senior Product Designer
Raptor Technologies
January 2020 – Present

Raptor Technologies offers a powerful suite of visitor management systems to schools. But not just any schools; the school where my son goes, and that your children might go to as well. Raptor systems are currently in 32,000 schools across the US, and rapidly branching out into several institutional security areas as well.

The mission: Protect every child, every school, every day.

I’m proud to bring my insight and experience to their product design effort.

Responsibilities include:

• Instituting and maintaining a DesignOps process to ensure consistent delivery of creative assets as products evolve and mature
• Institute product discovery, user research, user testing, and quantitative and qualitative analysis methodologies that bring greater product value
• Development and maintenance of UX design systems and research artifacts such as personas, journey maps and product flows
• Hands-on visual design of product UI

UX Lead – Decking Category
Global Custom Commerce / Blinds.com (a Home Depot company)
October 2017 – December 2019

Home Depot is the seventh largest online retailer in the world today. I have the privilege of impacting the user experience of customer and associate-facing UI with the IR (Interconnected Retail) team here at Global Custom Commerce. The IR team is super smart, dynamic and creative, and it’s a huge honor to be one of them. I support some of the most remarkable product managers in my career, and the positive energy is extremely contagious, to say the least.

Responsibilities included:

• Implementing “DesignOps” methodologies for agile design implementation
• Mockups and IA for various product features in the conceptual phase
• User testing concepts and implementing design solutions based on customer feedback and analytics
• Dev support for design implementation
• Supporting project managers in presentation, task prioritization and organization
• Journey mapping and persona creation for new product experiences
• Overseeing adherence to the visual design standards of Home Depot and Blinds.com properties

Ancillary responsibilities included:

• Storyboarding and audiovisual production support for sprint demo videos
• Responsive email visual design and development in Salesforce
• Junior team member training on design tools and methodologies

Creative Director, User Experience
Silicus Technologies
February 2015 – February 2017

Creative Direction

• Conceptualizing information architecture, interaction design and high-level creative vision for enterprise-grade software products
  
• Client-facing communication with UX and marketing stakeholders
  
• Working closely with internal UX and marketing teams
  
• Overseeing adherence to the overall design vision through the software development lifecycle

Practice Development

• Growing and organizing over 20 talented design and front-end development professionals into a global UX team with specializations in usability research, information architecture, interaction and visual design
• Incorporating UX thought and practice into existing software development methodologies
• Creating a hybrid stateside/offshore model for UX delivery

Training/Facilitation/Speaking

• Skill-building and growing offshore resources with video, digital survey tools and other distance learning tools
• Using corporate social media to build excitement over internal goings on in the UX space, reward success, and bring awareness to new trends

Business Development and Sales

• Internal and external evangelizing.
• Pitching UX with a powerful methodology and portfolio examples to eager and enthusiastic clients who share our passion for usable, delightful digital engagement

Usability Research

• Conducting formal and guerrilla usability testing with clients and compiling research data into action items for stakeholders and design/development teams

Branding and Marketing

• Designing both print and digital corporate identity materials for the firm and external clients